In the Bible, the very first chapter of the first book, Genesis, tells the story of God creating and uses a framework of six workdays to describe its development. Then in Chapter 2, verses 1 and 2, we see work, work, work.
[2:1] Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. [2] And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.
The story of creation from the Jewish scriptures, believed by Christians, is that creation was the product of
God gets right to work from the beginning of time. That’s unique. Many other creation stories in other cultures start with conflict between gods. They say we and our world are products of destruction. But the Christian story says we are products of construction.
When it’s all done, God is satisfied, and can rest. He’s said over and over as he created, it’s good. When he created humans he said it was very good. And then he rested, satisfied he’d done good work.
For the rest of the summer, we’ll be looking at work and rest, and how important they are for followers of Jesus.
And it starts here, with the simple fact that God works, and is still working to provide, care, heal and sustain life for us on earth.
God and Jesus work: in John 5:17 he responded to those who objected to him healing people on Saturday, what should have been a day of rest. He said, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.”
God didn’t stop working forever, he is still at work, including in and through his son Jesus.
Later in John 5:36 it’s clear God the Father has given him work to do…like an assignment.
Finally, work is in paradise. If the Garden of Eden, in creation, we get a picture of heaven on earth, and we see work is meant to be there, not just added in after humans rebelled against god – it was there before the rebellion. The nature of work changed, but it was meant to be there already.
Today we’ve seen, work is meant to be a good thing…something God embraces. Not an evil virus infecting life.
Question: Why is the goodness of work not more apparent in human life? What makes this so hard to believe?
Acknowledgements: Tim Keller, Every Good Endeavour and Work & Rest
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Yesterday I asked you to define love. One common way people today define love is to be as tolerant and permissive as possible, as long as the other person does not to hurt others.
See what a low standard that is? Jesus defines love to a much higher degree, he says to love one another as oneself. He knows we are self-centered…and Jesus uses that to teach us love for others.
Between loving God with everything, and loving neighbours as ourselves, Jesus has declared self-salvation to be impossible. We may love God to one degree or another. But with everything? We can and should try, but we reach our limits since we are only human, and separated ourselves from God in sin. We need help.
Equally true, we may make ourselves harmless and never say a word to anyone who isn’t harming another, but we can’t make ourselves completely love others as ourselves – we always want more for ourselves than to be tolerated and put up with. We can and should try to love others as ourselves, but we need the help of another to do this.
Jesus made himself harmless, and willingly sacrificed himself on a cross in the ultimate action of love for God and others. He led the way, and did what would be impossible for humans, so we could follow him in love for God and love for others, rather than trying to trailblaze ourselves.
We’ll look at this more in this upcoming series on neighbours.
Challenge: How do your actions “hang’ under love of God or love of neighbour? Is there anything you’ve done in the last week that doesn’t fit one of those loves?
